The importance of users' data in mobile telephone devices is becoming a great concern of the telecommunications industry, because wireless phones are increasingly being used not just for communication but also for managing personal data. Therefore, backing up this data is an important issue, in order to protect against data loss. Some of this data can be backed up in synchronization with a local personal-computer (PC), or remotely backed up with a synchronisation server located in a network. In case the device is lost or broken, or in case of a hardware (HW) crash, one-way synchronization from the server (or PC) to the phone can be established in order to restore the data. However, data such as documents, or photos taken by a phone's built-in camera, may not be part of a typical synchronization procedure, and they may require traditional backup to be done manually, instead of in a regular and synchronized way. Different types of data need to be backed up at different intervals, and also may require different storage capacities, and therefore a need exists for an efficient system of backing up different types of data to different locations.
Recently, PC “suites” have been developed, in order to provide a package of applications that allow a user to synchronize, edit, and back up many of a phone's files on a compatible PC through a wireless or cable connection. See, for example, Nokia PC Suite: Description, at http://www.nokia.com/nokia/0,,54691,00.html. Since PC suite development has moved application development from a “separate release for each phone” towards a “unified” operation mode, it is now increasingly important to minimize phone-dependent differences. This need for unified functionality includes backup and restore functionality, because there are many variations of locations, amounts, and types of data to be backed up. There also are a number of variations of phone devices having different sets of applications and features (e.g. camera included or not included, differing multimedia capabilities, et cetera), and therefore data content needs to be copied to and from different locations and by following different rules.
Additionally, it is also important to consider a device's ability to be backed up by a removable medium such as a multi media card (MMC). The same backup rules are needed in this MMC case in order to ensure a good user experience. It is not acceptable or efficient for backup instructions to have a different meaning if the device's removable backup/restore application is used instead of a corresponding application on the PC side performing the same backup function.
Traditional device side backups, and also backups taken from the PC side, have not had any coordination with each other, and no coordinated rules about which content to respectively manage, and how to manage content jointly. Instead, each side has had its own “exclude” lists used for blocking out unnecessary content from backup, and this has unfortunately led to the present difficult situation where backups are not necessarily consistent with each other.
It is known in the art to use an Object Exchange Protocol in order to provide a server with synchronization and backup services. See Infrared Data Association (IrDA) Object Exchange Protocol, OBEX, Version 1.3 dated Jan. 3, 2003, Section 8.3. However, no way has heretofore been found to use OBEX so as to allow consistent backups to a plurality of backup repositories which respectively back up different categories of data.